Oswald, In His Own Defense
	Copyright (c) 1997 by Joel Grant and John Locke


"I'm just a patsy!"

Thus spake Lee Harvey Oswald in the last hours of his life while under
arrest on suspicion of murder. The statement launched the term "patsy"
from gangland patois into one of the most familiar quotes in modern
history. In suggesting so much more than a simple "I'm innocent," it's a
metaphor for the entire case. 

The controversies surrounding the JFK assassination generally pare down to
a single point of friction. Either Oswald was what the Warren Commission
concluded from the facts before them, a young man who took his gun into
work and shot the president out the window; or, he was something
significantly stranger, a victim of fraudulent facts cleverly designed to
mask a conspiracy while sticking him with the full burden of guilt. Either
reality is born of the bare facts, or else it hides beneath a layer of
apparent fact. Simple perception versus the fog of illusion. 

Who was Lee Harvey Oswald? What was in his mind? That's the basic question
hanging over every chapter of his odd story. Was he, as facts appear to
show, an idealistic believer in Marxism since age fifteen; or was that
simply the "legend" created by some shadowy intelligence operation to
fabricate a motive and make Oswald appear to be that most palatable of
villains for the time, a communist? 

Oswald's life and politics--his self-taught Russian, his years in the
Soviet Union (puzzling to two superpowers), his support for communist
Cuba--have been examined at length. Less attention has been paid to his
actions during the last forty-eight hours of his life.  However, during
that brief period, his behavior shed direct light on his true aims and
inclinations as Oswald attempted to put on the record his own answer to
"Who was Oswald?" 

November 22, 1963. He was arrested inside the Texas Theater, a movie
house, less than two hours after the assassination. It was here that
Oswald's dualism first manifested itself, spurred, as with the claim of
patsyhood, by his own comments. As the police closed on him, he punched
Officer M.N. McDonald in the face.  Oswald then tried to pull his pistol
but instead was forcibly restrained and handcuffed. Later, he would
confess to his mother, his wife, and others, that the lumps he received
were justified by his resistance.  However, as he was led from the
theater, he shouted to the curious throng that had formed, "I protest this
police brutality!" In the public eye now, it was Oswald's first step
toward fostering a public image at odds with the actual situation. 

Later that afternoon, Oswald dropped a more problematic clue while being
led through a hallway at the Dallas jail. As he faced the assembled
reporters, he clenched his right fist, raising it upwards in what appeared
to be a salute of some kind. Of course, it's impossible to say exactly
what Oswald had in mind. He might have been showing a sign of confidence.
At least one reporter thought that Oswald was simply displaying his
handcuffs. (15H382) But the gesture is clearly conscious, and it was
understood by Oswald's ideological enemies, the crackpot right, as being a
Communist salute. (See, for example, CE1803, 23H434.) 

Important clues are provided by a phone list Oswald made out on the night
of the assassination (recovered from his pocket after death), with paper
and pencil provided by jail officer Jim Poppelwell when Oswald was
escorted to a telephone. The four numbers on the list and their owners
(CE2073): 
	
  - RI 8-9711, Dallas jail.
  - CO 7-3110, John Abt, attorney, business number at the  offices of David 
    Freedman and Abraham Unger, 320 Broadway, NY, NY.
  - AC 2-4611, John Abt, residence, 444 Central Park West,  NY, NY.
  - OR 9-9450, The Daily Worker, 23 West 26th St., NY, NY.

Police Captain Will Fritz had told Oswald he could call Abt collect, but
would have to give the operator the number he was calling from, which
explains the presence of the Dallas jail number.  (24H505) John Abt was a
staff attorney for the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), and rather
well-known as such. Communism blossomed as an intellectual movement in the
thirties, but in the World War and Cold War periods, fear of communism led
to a bevy of Federal, state, and local laws, enacted to persecute past and
present figures in the movement. In 1948, in one of the biggest of the
concomitant legal showdowns, Abt headed the Hall-Davis Defense Committee
which represented twelve top leaders of the CPUSA charged under 1940's
Smith Act of membership in a subversive organization. As a measure of his
reputation, in 1957, when Soviet spy Rudolph Abel was captured in Brooklyn
with spy paraphernalia, Abt was his attorney of choice (though Abt
declined). 

He was also the man that Oswald wanted as his lawyer. According to Fritz
(WR606): 

	I told him again that he could have an attorney any time he
	wished...He wanted to talk to [Abt] first...I asked him why he
	wanted Mr. Abt, instead of some available attorney. He told me he
	didn't know Mr. Abt personally, but that he was familiar with a
	case where Mr. Abt defended some people for a violation of the
	Smith Act, and that if he didn't get Mr. Abt, that he felt sure the
	American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) would furnish him a lawyer.

Oswald made repeated attempts to contact Abt over the weekend. He even
tried to recruit his wife's benefactor, Ruth Paine, to contact Abt on his
behalf. All to no avail. Word did reach Abt, but not from Oswald.
According to Abt (10H116): 

	On Friday evening, the 22nd, my wife and I left the city to spend
	the weekend at a little cabin we have up in the Connecticut woods.
	Sometime on Saturday, several people phoned me to say that they had
	heard on the radio that Oswald had asked that I represent him, and
	then shortly after that the press--both the press, radio, and TV
	reporters began to call me up there. I may say we have a radio but
	we have no TV there. And in the interim I turned on the radio and
	heard the same report.

	I informed them--and these calls kept on all day and night Saturday
	and again Sunday morning--I informed all of the reporters with whom
	I spoke that I had received no request either from Oswald or from
	anyone on his behalf to represent him, and hence I was in no
	position to give any definitive answer to any such proposal if, as
	and when it came. I told them, however, that if I were requested to
	represent him, I felt that it would probably be difficult, if not
	impossible, for me to do so because of my commitments to other
	clients. I never had any communication, either directly from Oswald
	or from anyone on his behalf, and all of my information about the
	whole matter to this day came from what the press told me in those
	telephone conversations and what I subsequently read in the
	newspapers.

When Warren attorney J. Lee Rankin asked Abt whether his prior association
with the ACLU brought him to Oswald's attention, Abt confirmed that he and
Oswald had been unacquainted (10H116): "No. My assumption was, and it is
pure assumption, that he read about some of my representation in the
press, and, therefore, it occurred to him that I might be a good man to
represent him, but that is pure assumption on my part. I have no direct
knowledge of the whole matter." 

But there's undoubtedly more to the pursuit of Abt than Oswald's faith in
his competence. Oswald subscribed to the CPUSA organ The Daily Worker, in
which Abt was frequently mentioned. Indeed, it may have been reportage in
the Worker that prompted Oswald to offer his services as a poster designer
to the Hall-Davis Defense Committee, which Abt had represented.  (See
testimony of James Tormey, executive secretary of the Hall-Davis Defense
Committee, 10H107-108.) Though Oswald never explained why he had the
Worker's phone number, a reasonable presumption is that it was an
alternate method of contacting Abt or others sympathetic to a cause he
fancied himself igniting; and the cause that would match his interest in
Abt or The Daily Worker is that of a communist suffering government
persecution, a cause divorced from the banality of crime but suggesting
instead an idealistic David facing an oppressive Goliath, a cause that
like-minded individuals would be expected to embrace. 

Ironically, Abt ultimately testified before the Warren Commission as the
legal representative of American Communist Party official Louis Johnson,
but this had no direct connection to Oswald.) While Oswald was devoting
his efforts to reach Abt, he received a Saturday afternoon visit from
Louis Nichols, the President of the Dallas Bar Association. Nichols wanted
to check that Oswald's rights were being observed. 

Immediately after leaving Oswald's cell, Nichols was interviewed on
WFAA-TV: 

	He advises that his first preference is that he be represented by a
	lawyer in New York, whose name I believe is John Abt...He then
	stated that if he could not be represented by that individual he
	would like to have a lawyer who was a member of the American Civil
	Liberties Union represent him. He says that if he was unable to get
	anyone from that organization, why then he might call upon the
	local Bar Association to represent him. I asked him whether or not
	at this time he was asking the Dallas Bar Association to do
	anything toward representing him and he advised that he was not,
	that he did not desire that we take any steps toward obtaining
	representation for him, and that if he was unable to obtain the
	other representation he might at a later time ask us to do so, and
	did ask that I would check back with him at a later time to see
	whether or not there would be any necessity or desirability that we
	attempt to furnish representation for him.

Later, before the Warren Commission, Nichols expanded upon his encounter
with Oswald. Relating a portion of the conversation, Nichols, quoting
Oswald, recalled: "And if I can find a lawyer here who believes in
anything I believe in, and believes as I believe, and believes in my
innocence...as much as he can, I might let him represent me." Oswald's
comments give further evidence, coupled with his interest in Abt, who he
may have believed to be a communist, that Oswald considered himself a
communist at that time. (Indeed, if those were Oswald's beliefs, his
instincts were eventually confirmed by Abt's autobiography wherein Abt
admitted to CPUSA membership dating from 1934.) 

The phone access, and Nichols' remarks, demonstrate that Oswald was given
ample opportunity to secure the kind of representation he desired. He also
had been repeatedly advised of his rights by the police and asked if he
wanted an attorney. Throughout, he declined local assistance, preferring
to hold out for Abt. Despite all that, during his brief "press conference"
around midnight on November 22, he asked that someone step forward to
represent him, falsely implying that he was being deprived of assistance
and that any competent help would be welcome.

Which returns us to the "patsy" claim. It's more than a profession of
innocence; it suggests he's being set up to take the fall for someone
else's crime. That's how the statement has generally been interpreted, but
is that exactly what Oswald meant? Was he telling the truth, or was it
another attempt to manipulate public opinion? In actuality, there was more
to Oswald's statement, made before television cameras, than has filtered
down to the mythology of popular memory. Oswald's full statement was,
"They're taking me in because of the fact that I lived in the Soviet
Union. I'm only a patsy!" 

His motivation couldn't be more plainly worded. He's not implying frame-up
in the detective story sense, where evidence has been planted to make an
innocent man appear guilty. He's filling out his public resume as a
political prisoner:  victim of police brutality, denied an attorney, and
detained for one grossly unjust reason, because he believes in communism.
Identifying with a cause publicly, especially under the glare of
publicity, virtually guarantees attracting proponents of that cause, and
most of the early critics of the Warren Commission--Thomas Buchanan, Leo
Sauvage, Sylvia Meagher, Mark Lane--were avowed leftists who accepted
Oswald's statements at face value, that he was a victim of political
prejudice. The myth of persecution Oswald sought to create for himself far
outlived him and his original intentions, the simple seeds of doubt he
planted on that brief and frenzied weekend having grown beyond his
prisoner of conscience persona into a mighty, multi-branched oak: Oswald
as CIA/FBI dupe, Oswald as Mafia stooge, Oswald as Cuban revolutionary,
Oswald as Manchurian Candidate, Oswald as every grand character of the
modern imagination, but never as the President's killer. 

The spontaneous facts of the historical moment do more to dispel the fog
of illusion that any amount of unfounded speculation.  Oswald's
manipulations are apparent from the evidence, and dovetail neatly with his
single-minded pursuit of Abt. Who was Oswald? By his own account, he was
still the Marxist he had always claimed to be. In the crazy, unrealistic
dreams we imagine him clinging to, that would make his case. John Abt, not
some crackerjack criminal defense attorney, would rise up to defend him
and, in a highly publicized show trial, Oswald would take his place
alongside other would-be martyrs of government persecution like Sacco and
Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss. Were it not for the brazen
vigilantism of Jack Ruby, Oswald would have had his trial. The real trial
would have disappointed his dreams, though. It would not have been about
ideology and the validity of political systems. It would have revolved
around the tawdry story of a cheap gun and a nonsensical assassin.
Ironically, in losing his shot at justice, Oswald gained a mythic status
in death he was unlikely to have achieved in life. 


				SOURCES

Abt, John and Myerson, Michael: "Advocate and Activist: Memoirs of an
American Communist Lawyer," University of Illinois Press, Champaign, 1993

Fariello, Griffin: "Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition, An
Oral History," W. W. Norton, New York, 1995

Ketchum, Richard M.: "The Borrowed Years 1938-1941: American on the Way to
War," Random House, New York, 1989

Klehr, Harvey, Haynes, John Earl and Firsov, Fridrikh Igorevich: "The
Secret World of American Communism," Yale University Press, New Haven,
1995

Newman, Albert: "The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: The Reasons Why,"
Clarkson Potter, New York, 1969

Posner, Gerald: "Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of
JFK," Random House, New York, 1993

Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President
John F. Kennedy [Warren Report], and the twenty-six volumes of Hearings
and Exhibits, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964

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